The following is my translation of Antoine Meillet’s 1922 article Un grand linguiste danois – Vilhelm Thomsen (“Vilhelm Thomsen – A Great Danish Linguist”).
The degree to which a civilized nation is able to contribute to the development of science has nothing to do with the size of its population. There are small nations that are particularly skilled at certain sciences and, at certain points in history, can play a decisive role.
Denmark has a prominent place in linguistics.
Before the beginning of the 19th century, barely anyone had noticed the striking similarities between the main languages of Europe; those who had done so saw these similarities as an idle curiosity, and nobody had attempted to lay the groundwork for a science based on these similarities: the comparative grammar of Indo-European languages.
If we investigate the beginning of this new science, we encounter the name of a Dane. Before Bopp, the Dane Rask had clearly recognized that all the major languages of Europe derived from a single unattested common language that was never written down, but whose existence had to be assumed to explain the observed similarities—a discovery that Rask published. It was left to the German Bopp to truly establish the new science, with his work leading to its first major development; it was left to another German, Pott, to complete the discovery by identifying most of the aspects of Indo-European etymology. Rask could not take full advantage of his ideas because of the turbulence and brevity of his life, the lack of a protector like the one Bopp found in Wilhelm von Humboldt, and an inability to use Sanskrit, which was only beginning to be studied in Europe. But the clarity, sobriety, and precision of Rask’s views lead one to believe to that if the comparative grammar of Indo-European languages had followed his direction and not that of Bopp, quite a few pointless structures would not have been constructed.
To his precise and largely definitive work, Bopp unfortunately mixed in a enormous number of hypotheses as to the “origins” of the grammatical forms of the ancient Indo-European languages. These speculations, unsupported by any evidence, about “primitive forms” undoubtedly contributed more to the initial success of comparative grammar than the solid part of his work. But, from 1870 to 1880, it was necessary to clean up the science.
Vilhelm Thomsen, who was born in Copenhagen in January 1842 and whose eightieth birthday is currently being celebrated, is one of the first “comparativists” to abandon imaginary theories on the “primitive” constitution of Proto-Indo-European and instead focus on a history of languages based on positive facts, rather than on haphazard hypotheses about “origins”.
While comparative grammar had up until that point been almost the exclusive domain of Germans, towards 1870 the new science began to be studied outside of Germany. The Frenchman Bréal and the Italian Ascoli pointed research in the direction of relatively modern facts and were more interested in history rather than imaginary prehistory. A little later, young scholars like the Genevan Ferdinand de Saussure and the Russian Fortunatov provided the theory of Indo-European languages with rigorous formulas. Scholars from Germany still contributed to a significant extent to the development of comparative grammar, but they no longer had a monopoly.
In 1877, a Dane, K. Verner, published a discovery that altered the course of linguistic research. In a penetrating insight, he explained the surprising irregularity of pronunciation present in the history of old Germanic by comparing it with the accentuation in ancient Indian texts. In this way, he helped to definitively establish that pronunciation evolves according to fixed and constant laws and to banish whims and caprice from the history of languages in general and from etymology in particular.
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The work of Vilhelm Thomsen is of an even more historical and fact-based nature. He has not only provided linguistics with new facts, but also steered it in a new direction whose excellence is continuously being shown by recent work.
Besides the Indo-European languages, there is another group of languages spoken in Eastern Europe and Siberia. The two most successful languages of this group are Hungarian and the Finnish of Finland, but there are many others–notably, Sámi in the far north of Europe and various varieties spoken in Russia in the Urals and the Volga basin. This group is known as Finno-Ugric.
Instead of focusing solely on Indo-European or solely on Finno-Ugric, V. Thomsen has studied the historical interactions between the two groups. Social groups that are less civilized1 “borrow”, as linguists say, many words from groups with a more advanced civilization; the Romans borrowed significantly from the Greeks, the Germans from the Romans, and so on. The development of the Finno-Ugric-speaking populations was hindered for a long time by an unfavorable climate, and so they borrowed many words from their Indo-European neighbors. Hungarian, for instance, is full of Slavic words. Long ago, when Finno-Ugric was still linguistically unified, the entire family borrowed Indian or Iranian words: the word for “hundred” in Finno-Ugric is Indo-Iranian. V. Thomsen has worked on loanwords in Finnish; in 1869, he described Germanic loanwords, and in 1890 he described loanwords from what is now called Baltic, a group including Lithuanian and Latvian, which are still spoken today.
The importance of this work is significant. The author’s mastery, the reliability of the evidence on which he based his conclusions, and the soundness of his conclusions were such that his results immediately became absorbed into the body of scientific knowledge. Published in 1869, his work on Germanic loanwords in Finnish was translated into German in 1870 by Sievers, a then young linguist, who was destined to become one of the most important Germanists of his generation. Indeed, the dissertation related as much to Germanic as it did to Finnish and contained facts shedding light on both. Borrowed during a very early period, before the existence of any written texts in Germanic, the words borrowed by Finnish from Germanic are as archaic or even more archaic than those found in the oldest Gothic or Scandinavian monuments.
But the use specialists found in V. Thomsen’s important initial work, as valuable as it is, is nothing compared to the more general significance of this type of research.
Before Thomsen’s work, linguists observed the (so to speak) linear development of a language considered as an isolated entity, without attributing much importance to outside influences. In fact, they were more interested in guessing at the initial “primitive” forms of these languages than in closely studying their development over the centuries. Thomsen’s 1869 work was a new and singular development in linguistics in that he focused only on words borrowed from one group of languages to another, showed how this phenomenon can be used to observe the development of the two groups, thus shedding light not only on the history of linguistic facts but also the history of nations themselves, and showed the ways in which one civilization influenced another.
Though it did not cause as much commotion, V. Thomsen’s second work on contact between Baltic and Finnic, published about twenty years later in 1890, was no less valuable. The author is just as masterful, the evidence just as reliable (and less well known), and the conclusions just as certain. The work’s relevance for the study of Finnish is in fact greater, because its Baltic loanwords are older than those from Germanic and occur in a larger number of Finnish varieties. Not only that, but it is at least as relevant to Baltic as Thomsen’s first work was for Germanic. But few people are interested in “Baltic” languages. It took the Great War for the two small nations that speak them, the Lithuanians and Latvians, to gain independence: Lithuanian and Latvian are spoken almost entirely by peasants and so far have mainly only been studied by a few curious linguists. Most of the languages’ historical range has gone to other languages; the third known Baltic language, Old Prussian, which was still commonly spoken in the province of Eastern Prussia in the 16th century, has been replaced by German–so much so that it is now the most German region in Europe, even though its linguistic composition was completely different three centuries ago–and all we have left of Old Prussian is a paltry number of old documents. To the east and the south, the Baltic domain was reduced by Slavic; the city of Vilnius, whose name is obviously Lithuanian, is no longer in Lithuanian linguistic territory, and the limits of the region where Lithuanian is spoken is a little west of Vilnius. But Baltic-speaking populations were formerly very powerful. We know that the Lithuanian princes extended their empire just beyond Kiev, and it is from them that the Jagiellonian dynasty (and later, after the definitive union of Poland and Lithuania, Poland) inherited their domination on the Western Russian populations. By showing how ancient Finnish populations were strongly influenced by Baltic speakers related to today’s Lithuanians and Latvians, but not influenced at all by the ancient Slavs, V. Thomsen has highlighted a fact barely taught by historians: the immense role played by Baltic speakers during the centuries immediately preceding and following the beginning of the Christian era.
Despite their linguistic and historical interest, these particular consequences resulting from V. Thomsen’s work are not of universal value. There is a much more important theoretical consequence that has been emphasized by modern developments in linguistics that were absent in 1869 or even 1890. The more closely the development of languages has been studied, the more important the role of civilizational influences (manifested in borrowings from one language to another) has proven to be. French is undoubtedly the form taken by Latin in particular historical conditions, and the main source of vocabulary in French consists of Latin words transmitted from generation to generation while changing in form and meaning. At the same time, it is almost impossible to write a phrase in French without using loanwords from written Latin; while the verb entendre “to hear” is an old word, related words like the abstract noun audition “hearing” and the agentic noun auditeur “hearer” are borrowed from written Latin. It was initially thought that vernacular varieties were pure and that studying them closely would show the results of the evolution of Latin on French soil; when they were finally meticulously examined, and when Gilliéron’s Atlas linguistique de la France uncovered the history of many local words through the process of comparison, it turned out that the vocabulary of dialects is to a large extent composed of borrowings and that the influence of literary French on dialects is much stronger than the other way around.
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A more personal discovery later placed V. Thomsen among the ranks of the great decipherers and demonstrated his brilliance, rigorous methodology, and insight.
Inscriptions in an unknown alphabet were discovered in Siberia on the banks of the Orkhon and Yenisei Rivers and were subsequently published, but no one knew how to read or interpret them. In 1893, V. Thomsen published a method to decipher the alphabet and, shortly thereafter, provided a complete transcription and translation of all known texts. He single-handedly succeeded in determining the value of every alphabetical sign. Though not a Turcologist, Thomsen recognized Turkish in the texts; as all Turkish varieties are similar and have not changed much during the eight or ten centuries they have been written down, his translation was practically definitive on the first try.
The method used by V. Thomsen to decipher this unknown alphabet is the same as that used by the German Grotefend, who began to decipher the cuneiform inscriptions of Darius and Xerxes in 1802, thus laying the foundation for the decipherment of all cuneiform texts, and by Champollion, who discovered how to solve the Egyptian hieroglyphs. This method consists of determining which words are likely to be already known proper names; Grotefend deciphered “Darius” and “Xerxes”, Champollion deciphered “Ptolemy” and “Cleopatra”, and V. Thomsen deciphered a Turkish king known from Chinese texts. Once the value of a few characters is determined, then, if the text is in a known language, it becomes possible to identify words that can then provide the values of other characters; each new letter facilitates the discovery of other intelligible words and thus of the values of more undeciphered characters. In this way, the values of every character in the alphabet can be determined.
In order for such a discovery to be possible, the unknown writing must at least partially represent a known language. To a large extent, the values of all the characters in the cuneiform inscriptions of the Persian kings were determined because the Old Persian in which they were written could be interpreted by means of modern Persian, as well as closely related ancient languages, such as the language of the Avesta and the less closely related Sanskrit. Nevertheless, because Old Persian is significantly different from all these languages, it took the efforts of many scholars — including, among others, the Danish linguist Rask — and forty-five years of work for the inscriptions of the Persian Achaemenid kings to be read in their entirety. If the language V. Thomsen encountered had not been so close to already well known Turkish varieties, the alphabet would not have been deciphered so quickly or so perfectly on the first try. But it was a triumph both for the method and V. Thomsen’s mastery that he was able to add an entirely new domain to Turcology without being a Turcologist himself, as well as to provide, by interpreting ancient texts, fundamentally important information for the oldest known historical period of Turkish.
There are numerous examples of the difficulty, and even the well nigh impossibility, of reading a text in a familiar writing system but in an unknown language. In Cyprus, written texts in an unknown writing system have been found; although the principle of the writing system is very different from that of the Classical Greek alphabet, those texts written in Greek have been deciphered, and they have provided Hellenists with curious information. But this alphabet was also used to write another language. Though these texts written in an unknown language can be read because of the phonetic values provided by the Greek texts, it has so far been impossible to interpret them meaningfully. The Lycian inscriptions found in Asia Minor and the large number of Etruscan inscriptions in Italy can be read in their entirety, but as they do not resemble any known language, it has not been possible to interpret these inscriptions except to a very limited extent. V. Thomsen himself has worked on these texts, but though the resulting fruits of his ingenuity, wisdom, and accurate judgment are very interesting, they are quite paltry in comparison to his achievements in the realm of Turkish.
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These important works are not the only ones published by the illustrious master of Copenhagen; they are only the ones that made him famous. His other studies on various subjects are no less a testament to the power of his discerning and bold spirit. All of his work is significant. For example, in one article he proposed the only plausible explanation for the origin of the French verb aller “to go”–namely, that a word can have an unusual pronunciation in certain unique circumstances and thus evolve in an unusual way. This has proved to be a fruitful principle. Thus, modern linguistics bears the mark of V. Thomsen’s ideas.
And this great scientist has not isolated himself in Copenhagen. Besides the Scandinavist Wimmer and the renowned Romanist Nyrop, who is one of the leading experts on the history of French, V. Thomsen also has among his students two of the most original contemporary linguists: Jespersen and H. Pedersen. Jespersen has mainly focused on the history of English. He has shown how the development of Indo-European languages led to English, which is the most divergent Indo-European language, and how, contrary to the bizarre ideas of the Romantics, language becomes clearer, easier to use, and more useful as it sheds the complexity of ancient grammatical forms like those found in the Vedas and in Homer.
Pedersen has an exceptional breadth of knowledge. From Slavic to Celtic and Albanian, he has tackled some of the most difficult issues, with his ideas leaving a mark everywhere. He has been the first to write a comparative grammar of those Celtic varieties whose obscurity has discouraged so many linguists. Today, V. Thomsen is the most well known name in linguistics. But it must also be taken into account that he is a successor of the great Rask, a follower of Verner, and the teacher of Jespersen and Pedersen. All these scholars combine complete independence of spirit with methodological rigor, and a sense of reality with a powerful imagination. Without their work, it would be difficult to imagine what modern linguistics would be like today.
A. Meillet.
1. [In modern terms, one might say that languages that are less prestigious tend to borrow words from languages that are more prestigious.–Fancua]
Fancua 